Learn Chess Openings

By bookup on Monday, July 5th, 2010 | Comments Off on Learn Chess Openings

You want to learn chess openings fast? Three things you must do:

PLAN, TRAIN, PLAY
You must PLAN. You must choose your chess opening moves, a process known as creating a “repertoire.” An opening repertoire is a decision tree of your choices that you are prepared to make move-by-move in each game without further thinking.

Your repertoire allows you to play the chess openings quickly with confidence, saving time on the clock. You prevent mistakes.

You need a way to document your moves and your notes. As you make moves in Chess Openings Wizard (Express and Professional) every move you make is instantly saved and checked for transpositions. It instantly saves every note you type.

You also want to leverage the repertoires of masters. You can slash the amount of time needed for the planning phase by starting with an ebook on an opening played by grandmasters. Here you adopt the thinking of a grandmaster or teacher or coach who has already prepared an opening repertoire. The author’s recommendations and notes are ready to learn.

You need a way to update your repertoire as new games are published. Chess Openings Wizard imports PGN files from the internet or from game databases such as ChessBase, Chess Assistant and MasterChess. Chess Openings Wizard also imports the games that you have played on internet chess servers. These added games extend your repertoire, and Chess Openings Wizard can color code the new moves to show you where your repertoire has grown.

You want to be sure your new ideas are accurate. Chess Openings Wizard has built in chess engines that will instantly assess any position and recommend the best lines of play for both sides.

You must TRAIN yourself and test your memory to be sure you know your repertoire. You want to be able to play out your plans quickly on the internet and over the board.

Chess Openings Wizard plays mock games against you to test your chess opening knowledge. It can force you (and the computer) to play only moves in the ebook or even to play only the best moves in the ebook (which you can select).

When you stop training, you need to be able to instantly edit your repertoire. You need to go beyond canned tutorials to constantly deepen your knowledge of the opening. Chess Openings Wizard does this.

You must PLAY in order to test your openings. You want to consider playing on the internet where your games are logged in a PGN file, because at some point in each game you or your opponent will play a move that is beyond your knowledge of the chess opening. After the game, you must cycle back to the planning phase to decide what to do when you’re faced with that opening position again.

Chess Openings Wizard “watches” the log file of your internet chess games, automatically imports your games into your repertoire ebooks, and takes you immediately to the point in the chess opening where you or your opponent played a move that was not in your repertoire. From there you are back in the planning phase where you can get help from the built in chess engine and also research master games for an opinion on the new move.

Cycling steadily through the Plan, Train and Play phases constantly grows your knowledge of the chess opening and improves your confidence and your results. Chess Openings Wizard takes care of the tedious work of comparing your games to your plans.

Chess Openings Wizard Professional contains sophisticated tools for planning. It uses chess engines to analyze your entire repertoire (not just games) overnight. Then it show positions where the Informant symbols don’t agree with the computer analysis. These might be improvements over chess theory or corrections to tactical flaws in your repertoire or at least new ideas worth considering.